Guest Editorial: RAI's First Annual Postgraduate Conference, September 20, 2011, Department of Anthropology, Durham University

Abstract

Durham University hosted the Royal Anthropological Institute’s First Annual Postgraduate Conference, held on September 20, 2011. The conference not only provided an opportunity for the postgraduate students at various universities across the UK to present their papers but also to know what RAI has to offer them in order to enhance the quality and exposure of their researches (Handley et al. 2012). Since this was the first conference by the RAI at postgraduate level appealing all sub-disciplines of anthropology, no particular theme was proposed. For this reasons, the conference happened to be a ‘collage’ of a variety of themes and issues in which British anthropology is contemporarily engaged in at home and overseas. When I shared the idea of publishing the conference papers as a special issue with Dr. Claudia Merli, DAJ’s General Editor, and Dr Stephen M. Lyon, Conference Advisor and DAJ’s former General Editor, they happily agreed. They also encouraged the participants to publish their researches, and answered their queries about how to publish journals during a session at the conference dedicated on publishing in anthropology. This special issue, as the first episode of this conference publication, offers six papers. Although there is no common focus of these papers just as there was not any at the conference, these involve the topics related to ethics, health, gender, identity, vulnerabilities, and human rights. There is, however, a common thread of policy-oriented research along most of these papers.